An attorney who worked on a landmark educational equity case in California was confirmed as the head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights on Thursday.

The Senate confirmed Catherine Lhamon, the current director of impact litigation at the pro bono Public Counsel law firm in California, as assistant secretary of the department’s civil rights office. Her pro bono law firm has been deeply involved in changing racially disparate school discipline policies in Los Angeles.

Lhamon also worked on the Williams v. California case, a class-action lawsuit that forced the state to provide equal access to textbooks and other materials, qualified teachers and safe school buildings.

She has been with Public Counsel since 2009, and before that worked for the ACLU of Southern California. In the late ’90s, she was a supervising attorney in the appellate litigation program at the Georgetown University Law Center.

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has been particularly active in recent years. In 2010, the Obama administration began targeting the disparate effects of school discipline policies. Since then, the Education and Justice departments have investigated a number of school districts and forced prescriptive changes in many of them, including in Oakland, Calif.; and Christina, Del. The agency also has aggressively investigated cases of sexual harassment and violence at colleges and schools. And in a first, it recently decided that a California school district must treat a transgender teen born female as male, including giving him access to male school facilities and activities.

There’s no start date yet for Lhamon, who will take the place of Acting Assistant Secretary Seth Galanter and hard-charging Assistant Secretary Russlynn Ali, who left the agency in November after more than three years.

California Lawyer magazine named Lhamon an attorney of the year for civil rights in 2004. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Amherst College and law degree from Yale Law School.